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This research provides accounting-ethics authors and administrators with a benchmark for accounting-ethics research. While Bernardi and Bean (2010) considered publications in business-ethics and accounting’s top-40 journals this study considers research in eight accounting-ethics and public-interest journals, as well as, 34 business-ethics journals. We analyzed the contents of our 42 journals for the 25-year period between 1991 through 2015. This research documents the continued growth (Bernardi & Bean, 2007) of accounting-ethics research in both accounting-ethics and business-ethics journals. We provide data on the top-10 ethics authors in each doctoral year group, the top-50 ethics authors over the most recent 10, 20, and 25 years, and a distribution among ethics scholars for these periods. For the 25-year timeframe, our data indicate that only 665 (274) of the 5,125 accounting PhDs/DBAs (13.0% and 5.4% respectively) in Canada and the United States had authored or co-authored one (more than one) ethics article.

The paper's aim is to thoroughly examine solutions to mission diffusion and mission drift in the microfinance industry.

Extensive field experience relating to individual microfinance institutions and industry trends provide the grounding for a review of the trade and academic literatures in microfinance and social enterprise management.

Mission diffusion arises from pursuing diverse approaches to poverty alleviation and addressing disparate and changing stakeholder interests. Mission drift arises from commercialization and conversion activities aimed toward enhancing ratings and achieving scale. Mission clarity can be regained through clarification of the mission along with more effective corporate governance and performance management systems, and a research function.

The tension between financial and social performance is not merely ideological – economic realities make it almost impossible to stay on mission. Understanding these realities can help microfinance institutions maintain and regain clarity of mission.

The paper sheds new light on solutions for challenges of mission drift and diffusion in the microfinance industry. Addressing this would enable the industry to deliver on promises of poverty alleviation during a period of heavy demand rapid scaling.

While management control and performance measurement research and practices have advanced significantly in the last decades, the research and applications to social impacts and social purpose organizations are underdeveloped. This chapter reports on three research studies that have important implications for future research and practice in the use of management control and performance measurement to solve global societal challenges.

This chapter provides new frameworks and performance measurement approaches used in three recent series of research projects. It also provides the results of this extensive research in using existing theories and managerial practices to improve success and the measurement of success in for-profit and nonprofit organizations that are focused on increasing their positive social impacts.

This research that spans more than 20 years and includes numerous projects and research methods in many countries has discovered a prior lack of application of existing theories, approaches, tools, and measures that are fundamental to management control and performance measurement. It found that much work is still needed in both academic research and managerial practices to apply them effectively in social purpose organizations and suggests areas for future research.

By reviewing the literature comprehensively and doing a series of related research projects, this analysis provides a foundation for future research in the applicability of management control and performance measurement approaches to the measurement and improvement of the social impacts of both for-profit and nonprofit organizations.

Recent research suggests that the firm's management control system (MCS) can have a significant and recursive influence on strategy formulation. We expand this discussion by arguing that the strategic role of MCS can be enhanced through its management of the firm's dynamic capabilities (Teece et al., 1997). Dynamic capabilities are the unique abilities to create and sustain competitive advantage based on a firm's processes (routines), positions (resources), and paths (strategic choices). We discuss various ways in which the MCS might more effectively help firms identify and build such dynamic capabilities. Specifically, we propose that this can be accomplished by: (1) increasing both management and employees' strategic understanding of the ongoing inventory of the firm's existing processes, positions, and paths, and (2) building new knowledge-generating mechanisms into these processes, positions, and paths. We offer a set of related research propositions for future studies and suggest behavioral research methods that can be used to investigate the propositions.

The purpose of this paper is to consider an archetypal illustration of change possibilities manifested in a corporation, Enron Corporation, operating within the context of global market capitalism.

The approach taken is a theory guided case study.

It was found that the culture within Enron changed from one grounded in a regulatory ethos to one fully dedicated to unregulated, free marketeering, and illustrates both the best and worst of market capitalism. The character and trajectory of the change was a combination of both internal and external forces, and the ability to recognize and balance the inherent enabling and debilitating dimensions.

In this paper, the structuration theory analysis aids focus on the extant norms and values and in seeing how, though the actions of the participants, they construct, and are constructed by, the representation schemes and the power relationships. The analysis of Enron illustrates that change driven by the dominance of unregulated markets can limit the scope of actual, and perceived, ethical alternatives considered by the organizational actors. As such, the perceived options are restricted and any sense of individual or collective responsibility and accountability is dampened.

The purpose of this paper is to thoroughly examine sources of mission diffusion and mission drift in the microfinance industry and to identify consequences of and remedies to these problems.

Extensive field experience relating to individual microfinance institutions (MFIs) and industry trends provides the grounding for a review of the trade and academic literatures in microfinance and social enterprise management.

Mission diffusion arises from pursuing diverse approaches to poverty alleviation and addressing disparate and changing stakeholder interests. Mission drift arises from commercialization and conversion activities aimed toward enhancing ratings and achieving scale. Mission clarity can be regained through clarification of the mission along with more effective corporate governance and performance management systems.

The tension between financial and social performance is not merely ideological – economic realities make it almost impossible to stay on mission. Understanding these realities can help MFIs maintain and regain clarity of mission.

The paper sheds new light on reasons the microfinance industry has not been able to deliver on promises of poverty alleviation during a period of heavy demand rapid scaling.